Thursday, September 6, 2012

When The Hard Way Is The Only Way To Learn

Kathy DalPra, a bridal blogger, has learned about the dangers of copyright infringement the hard way and dodged a bullet. She received a cease and desist letter accompanied with a demand for no less than $30,000 in damages. Lucky for her, she was able to clear out a misunderstanding to show that she in fact did have the photographer's permission.

This illustrates the necessity of legal consequences to educate the public with regards to copyright infringement. The pervasive culture is that it is a consequence-less crime; until, that is, consequences do materialize.
If someone that I actually DID get permission from to use her images wanted to sue me or the publication I posted them in, can you imagine how someone might react if I didn't have their permission?
Then a lesson is learned. Never before, unfortunately.

2 comments:

Cindy Schnackel said...

I looked at a couple other of her articles written since this one, one about pinning safely: http://brideappeal.com/_blog/blog/post/image-copyright-tips-for-safely-pinning-of-pinterest/ I want to point out that she is saying a Pin Button on your site is "permission." Whether her lawyer told her this or not, I did believe that was a huge reason to join others in complaining to sites I was on, until the site removed the Pin button. Many artists do not give permission for pinning, due to Pinterest's particular model and TOS, even if they're ok with social media sharing in general. Pinterest is 'different' to many creators. So when the Pin button was removed from Red Bubble, Blue Canvas and I think some other sites I'm not on, too, members were largely happy. Implied permission can be a serious thing. And, whether the author in the link is correct or not, you know the presence of a Pin button surely comes across as permission to pinners.

A Glass Artist said...

She may have altered the entry in response to your comment - now, she suggests, quite rightly I might add, that without screenshot of the PIN IT button, one might be in trouble.

With picstopin, a site that scrapes images and adds PIN IT button, I would say that a lawsuit would quite likely hit maximum penalties for (1) infringing and (2) broadcasting it with the express purpose of further infringement.

Technically speaking, the EMBED button poses a similar conundrum.